Yetoma
by Cricket Songs
Summary: On the morning of December 10, 2009, Ziva's ties to her old world are suddenly, violently broken. A bomb drifts over Jerusalem. Israel is gone. Rated for heavy subject matter - a three-part story/extended oneshot. Chapter 1 is really more of a prologue.
1. Prologue

I figured I might give this NCIS fandom another go, mostly because my muse won't shut up and I'm just _at my wit's end_ with him.

I don't claim to know much about politics (by that I mean foreign politics), but I guess (or hope?) that I know enough. This story does occur beyond the world of NCIS, so to speak, but is, of course, centered around the show and its characters. This will probably be about three chapters long. I'd prefer to think of it as an extended one-shot, because the idea of writing a chaptered story makes me want to hyperventilate.

I searched high and low to be sure that this plot had not been done before, and though my search (thankfully) yielded no results, that doesn't mean it hasn't been done. So I'm sorry if this is an old plot. I really don't think it is.

Anyways, I won't be cute about it because this chapter is heavy, but please remember to review. And remember my proposal - you leave a review, I'll return the favor.

Thanks.

- Cricket

* * *

**Yetoma**

* * *

The sun sits upon the lip of the horizon, plump and red like a ripened pomegranate. It casts a shroud of soft, pink light through the sky, throws shadows behind schoolhouses, streetlamps, the ankles of the men and women padding softly down sidewalks and alleyways. Cars clot the streets; they gleam in the pink morning light, crawling along in a haze.

In a marketplace on the far side of Jerusalem, an old woman loads swollen loaves of bread into her basket. Arabic floats sweetly between vendor and customer, melodic and soft, for the morning is quiet, the air is thick and warm.

The eyes in the leathered faces of the elderly gaze blearily into the morning, dark with a kind of fleeting contentment; a passing knowledge that this moment of warmth and serenity can be, will be broken, as easily as it has descended. Hearts beat carefully beneath their breasts; pulses throbbing thickly.

Four children in an empty street chuck stones into the gutters. A thin, tired pup lifts its brown head from the pavement and peers sleepily across the sidewalk, tail kicking dust up off the ground. The backdrop of buildings throws a shadow across their shoulders, but the children scarcely notice, happily plucking rocks from beneath street signs and gaping black windows, drawing their thin arms back and tossing the rocks across the concrete. Fat stones, too cumbersome to travel the distance, simply hop across the ground and settle there, a yard or two away from the little flock of children; but the pebbles fly farther, hit the gutter and roll and travel on. Some make it down the incline of the street and tumble lightly down the steps of the ancient city, clanging and clicking and making the streets echo. They stop at the foot of the steps and settle in the darkness there, quickly cooling in the nooks of space which the sun has yet to reach.

Old wounds of bullet holes on brick in the buildings around them is a simple, unremarkable feature of the environment. The phantom sound of the drumming of gunfire pulses quietly in the backs of the minds of the children, a memory, familiar and unclean – but, for the moment, a memory and nothing more.

To the north, a man meanders stiff-backed down a hallway and turns a set of silver keys into the tumbler. He pushes the door open and enters his office, going quickly to his desk to lay his jacket on the back of his chair, to sort papers, to make phone calls. He sinks into the chair and nurses a mug of coffee. The phone rings.

Just outside his window, a bird is preening its feathers from the tip of the flagpole. The flag is beaming like a ribbon, flashing blue and white in the lazy morning breeze.

_Far away, a woman turns in her bed and wearily regards the moonlight glowing on the far wall._

The sky across the desert goes white.


	2. Phantom Limbs

A/N: My apologies for the delay. Life is rough sometimes.

For those who asked and those who didn't ask but maybe wanted to, the title of this story (Yetoma) translates to "orphan" in Hebrew; as one reviewer deftly pointed out, Ziva probably already considered herself largely orphaned at the start of the current season. But there's something deeper than that, I think. Israelis - Israeli soldiers, and Mossad officers especially - have a special kind of connection to their homeland, instrinsically and chosen, and it would hurt, to say the least, to see something so awful happening to it. There's more to that, too, but I'll delve into deeper details in the next chapter.

Disclaimer (freaking hate these things): I'm a college student/English tutor and an on-again off-again janitor for the local hospitals, food banks, and animal shelters – do you really think that I have any monetary connections to this show? I can barely even feed myself. I'm merely playing with these characters for my own amusement (though I cannot promise to return them in the same condition in which they were received). But at the end of the day, all that I own is a shred of sanity, a pair of water-logged hiking boots and a cat. And the cat is missing half his tail, so really he's only a fraction of a cat.

This chapter is for Quinndolynn, who had enough review tickets to redeem one new chapter/new story (you're getting both, by the way), or two koala-shaped Pez dispensers.

Sorry I didn't tell you about the Pez dispensers - no refunds.

* * *

She slept fitfully all night, and she blamed it on too much caffeine; too many thoughts. Cool winter air flitted in from beneath the bedroom window; wisps of hoary moonlight dancing across the floorboards.

She tucked the bedcovers down beneath her arms and turned to gaze at the ceiling, thinking _it's getting late _and _I will never drink coffee again_, and when the red, beaming digits in the clock on her nightstand declared 0200, she huffed out a breath and squeezed her eyes closed. She knew she shouldn't blame the coffee. Sleep had not come easily to her, not for several months; trying to sleep was almost inevitably fruitless.

Her stomach had grown tight with the residual worry and anxiety that had become a nightly routine, but her eyelids were heavy, and soon she found herself lingering in the space between the sleeping world and the waking world; wedged between dreaming and turning in her sheets.

Her cell began to chirp from the nightstand.

It sounded distant.

She kept her eyes closed. The tired, floating feeling in her head was too comfortable to forfeit.

When it stopped ringing, she fell asleep.

* * *

The chirping came again at 0245, and then periodically throughout the early morning. Four calls, one caller. No messages. There weren't words sufficient for delivering that kind of news.

* * *

She awoke again at 0430 and padded quietly into her kitchen. She set the coffee carafe down in the pit of the sink and twisted the faucet on, and while it filled, she turned from the counter and flipped on the television. She caught the tail-end of an unremarkable TV commercial, and then the image was there, suddenly; no warnings, no disclaimers, not even a banner along the bottom of the screen to confirm what she already recognized; mangled buildings, tarps on bodies, and something twisted hard beneath her ribcage and rapidly diffused into a cold, heavy numbness.

The carafe in the sink was overflowing.

Israel was gone.

* * *

She didn't come into work that day. No one blamed her.

* * *

The plasma in the bullpen was dark and quiet; they had left it on, at first, to catch the news feed as the story unfolded – but the dawning realization of the true implications this had, and the unspoken certainty that one very crucial facet of their team had lost a part of herself in the chaos, that the dynamic had rapidly changed for all of them – prompted them to turn it off. They didn't want to see it. Still, from the break room down the hall there came the blaring noise of a national station carrying the story.

They tried not to listen.

* * *

She made tea and put lemon and honey in it, and when it burned her tongue she poured it down the sink. Her stomach was heavy and cold. Some prickling sensation like crude wool being swept across her calves threatened to fold her legs out from beneath her and so she sat; but in sitting, felt gallingly restless and uncomfortable. She found herself by the window, with no sense of the hour or just how long it had been since she'd heard the news, staring out at the city, not understanding anything which her eyes registered, not making the connection between her physical location and her thoughts.

It was quiet, aside from the patter and occasional roar from the rain. Quiet, she thought, and guessed that maybe even here, in this foreign place that knew so little of the desert, even here in the atmosphere of the city could be felt the sudden tragedy in Israel. The city had awoken to the realization that part of the world had gone up in flames while it was sleeping; the cars were sluggish as they glutted the streets, pedestrians ambling down sidewalks and under bus stops in a haze. The world was missing a part of itself. She could see it through her bedroom window, could feel it in the suddenly too-small space of the room – the world could sense this new void where the people of Israel had been, like the pulse of a phantom limb still beating in the ether.

She watched the city and the rain and she wondered if the souls of her people had floated through the air, if the rain was heavy with their ashes.

At some point, she realized that she hadn't cried.

* * *

Someone must have knocked, because she was standing at the door and the knob was being turned and there was someone on the other side.

* * *

He didn't say much, because for once there was very little for him to say; and if he _had _spoken, she wouldn't have heard the words. Her mouth felt like it had been stuffed with cotton, her tongue too big and her gums too scratchy, but she licked her lips and nodded very slightly and said, "Tony." Something was clouded in her eyes. It wasn't grief, and it wasn't tears. A familiar kind of calculation, delayed. Something was blocking the transmitters in her head; that flip-switch decision of who needed to die for this and who needed to be detained was being held back by a moment of shock in the workings of her mind; it was _too big_. She couldn't solve this the way she would have liked. It was going to take longer, it was _outside _herself; but still, the shrewd desire to sort this problem out remained intact. She fought to dredge it up from beneath the outrage and confusion: this wasn't something new to her, it was something very _Mossad, _something very _David_, and that only made it harder.

He lifted his chin, and she let him into her apartment.

* * *

She had the presence of mind to check her cell phone while they waited – though neither one of them understood what the waiting was for, just yet – because his presence reminded her that she had living friends in DC, and that probably his presence indicated that they were thinking of her (though the notion seemed absurd, considering the state of things on the other side of the ocean; it was absurd that they were thinking about _her _and not about _all _the dead and wounded back in Israel).

Missed calls. A familiar name, a foreign number. She called back without knowing what she would say, suddenly overcome with fear and apprehension and a glimmer of somber, doomed hope – and was saved the trouble when nobody answered.

Dunia Matin, who had been her friend in the Israeli army and for several years thereafter, had been alive to make the call in the hours following the attack; she was dead by the time Ziva found her missed calls.

* * *

Something cracked a little.

There came a tickling of recognition. The beginnings of some real understanding of what had happened, and slowly the shock and the numbness was ebbed: Israel was gone. Like the Pharaohs. Like Pompeii in the shadow of Vesuvius. Like a fleet of Spanish ships plunging down into the deep; like soldiers in trenches and the ghosts of dead cities. Israel was gone in a puff of steam and dust, an old Death settling into the crooks beneath the wall at Mosada. Death before the eyes of the Romans, and it had taken a few thousand years and some jumps in technology, but they'd done it, someone had pulled the trigger and Israel was suddenly, simply _gone_ and that _meant_ something to her.

The numbness was fading, very slowly.

It wasn't a new process for her, by any means, but it was sharp and focused and decided in a way far more profound than she'd ever known before: rage was coming in, with grief quick at its heels.

* * *

A/N: More dialogue, less fragmentory writing in the next chapter.

Remember, the core of the Earth is fueled by reviews, and if you stop reviewing, the world will stop spinning. We don't want that. That would be bad.


	3. Birdwings

It had been twenty-seven hours since the bomb had been dropped on Jerusalem – twenty-four since the first broadcast had gone out on American television. And still the president had not spoken, had not shown his face; was hidden behind the thick white doors in a chamber at the belly of his thick white house. Ziva left the TV on in her living room, waiting to hear something new, half-hoping for a new war on the other side of the world so that her new home could avenge the death of her old one, and she wasn't really listening to any of the vague white noise that came from it.

She flitted nervously back and forth between the window and the far wall, arms crossed, back rigid. For all her anger and outrage and frustration, Tony was entirely composed – he simply stood behind the island in the kitchen and watched her. When she came near enough to be reached, he handed her a glass of whiskey, and she took it.

Finally, she heard a voice she recognized.

"Last night," he began, and she turned sharply to regard the screen. She didn't realize that she was holding her breath. "Our friends in Israel suffered a great loss at the hands of the Iranians."

Something twisted in her gut.

"Thousands are dead."

That was an understatement. Her stomach twisted again, and she _knew_.

"Thousands more are wounded, sick, missing or displaced. This is a grave tragedy. It is not only a dark day for Israel, her allies, and all powers of the Middle East, but for the entire world.

"There isn't a man or woman among us who hasn't been greatly affected by this loss. We have sent military personnel…"

She unfolded her arms, folded them again, and Tony was pouring another glass of whiskey and she thought that he probably had this figured out, too, and she wondered how he could be calm about it; and realized with a little jolt of envy that this wasn't as significant for him as it was for her. His country was still standing, after all.

"…along with doctors and political aids to help bring relief to those just outside Jerusalem and the immediate radius of the attack."

She thought for a moment that he wouldn't say it, but she was caught on every word. He needed to say it.

"And although there is a strong American presence in place in the regions of Israel where life still persists, the global powers are currently scrambling to fully understand the implications and ramifications of this attack."

She bit her tongue until it hurt.

"In the midst of such confusion, I cannot commit myself or this country to any form of action against the perpetrators of this crime."

It was early, she thought. Far too early, anyway, but she let her breath out in a ragged sigh and Tony was pouring her a new glass, his knuckles brushing against her arm, and he was saying,

"It isn't his decision to make," and she knew that, and, "We'll have to wait until they know more, to really know if we're gonna send soldiers over there," and she knew that, too.

But no one was making a stand, either, and that pained her.

* * *

It was getting late. She pulled her fingers through her hair in a kind of nervous habit, and her fingertips brushed hotly against her temples. She knew that it _too much_ to take in all at once. Swaying once on her feet and then quickly finding solid ground again, she stalked to the window, looked out, and folded her arms sharply across her chest. Her mussed hair fell in curls along her cheeks; her eyes glassy and dark with her own inner turmoil.

Without turning, she spoke. "Everything is gone."

She heard a sound like glass clinking quietly against glass. Tony said nothing.

"I should have _been _there," she said, and tightened her arms around herself compulsively.

"You've died too many times already, Ziva."

Ignoring this, and ignoring, too, the part of her brain which urged her to hold back, to not take this out on Tony, who had really done nothing wrong, she rounded on him.

"How am I supposed to deal with this?" she spat, and unfolded her arms to make erratic, sweeping gestures, "_this_, this….being _here _while everyone and everything I grew up with, everything I fought for, all of it is gone? Dying? What would you do if you woke up one morning and learned that half of your country had been slaughtered in your sleep? Would you be _okay_ after that? Do you expect me to be _okay_? How would you _deal _with this, Tony?"

She licked her lips, let her arms fall limply to her sides. She was crying; hot, angry tears borne of her sudden helplessness and loss. "I don't know what I am supposed to do," she said quietly.

He regarded her for a moment, and she wondered when he had moved away from the island in the kitchen. He seemed closer. She really wished that he could tell her a joke or brush this off with a grin and some charm; she wanted normalcy. Tony was normal.

But nothing was normal about _this_.

"There's nothing you _can_ do," he said, and she hated him for it, but knew that it needed to be said.

* * *

The city was dark and the streetlamps came on, and as the traffic outside her window pulsed with the steam and the rain and the gleam of wet hubcaps in the gutters, she decided that the room was too small; she laced up her boots with numb, nimble fingers, scooped up her house keys and left.

He watched her go without a word, because he had spoken before but the words had been empty and dumb. And he could feel the floor hard beneath his feet, a solid mesh of stone and metal and wires, and realized, not for the first time, that she was going where he could not follow – for the ground beneath her had shifted, was always shifting, like the sand in the dunes of the desert, and she was always falling; faltering for purchase.

And he was still clinging to the ground.

* * *

He let her in, and did not speak. And for the first time that day she was able to relapse into some shred of normalcy, because he always let her in, and he had _never _been a man of many words.

* * *

Moving without thought and without purpose, she found herself downstairs and in the basement, and she was staring at the floor for several minutes before she realized that the stain was only in her mind; and was startled to realize that she had never looked for that stain before, had never wondered about it, not in the five years since she had pulled that trigger and killed her only brother. And it occurred to her that whoever had cleaned it up had really scrubbed. It did something to her sanity to realize that of course that someone had been Gibbs.

Gently, he coaxed her towards the corner. She leaned with her back to the wall, feeling tired and physically worn, and wondering how that was even possible. She felt as if she had barely moved, had done nothing, had been idle and sluggish and useless all day; but her feet were sore and her back was hurting and the bones in her hands, the ones that had been broken and then knitted not so long ago, were aching with the moisture in the air. She felt old.

And despite all of it, she felt very much alive; was acutely aware of the blood in her veins and the thump of her heart and the flush, clammy pinkness of her hands where she had fisted them so tightly that her nails had left indents in the soft fleshy surface of her palm. And beneath it all she felt as if she were searing like a swath of hot oil; not boiling or bubbling or violent like water, but thick, and still, and motionless. As if she were waiting for something to fall into her grasp, something she could swallow and singe.

Which is why she started a bit when he handed her a glass, for fear of setting them both ablaze – but he scarcely seemed to notice. He poured something for himself and leaned back against the edge of a wooden table, staring back at her.

And she wondered why everyone seemed to intent on getting her drunk.

She put her hands around the glass, staring down into it.

She suddenly wanted the silence to leave the room, and as the thought came to her, she found herself speaking aloud.

"Have you ever heard the story of Masada?" she asked, and her voice felt slow and clumsy.

He tipped his head a bit to the side, considering. "Yeah," he said, clearly sorting through his mind to pick at an old memory, "a long time ago."

She licked her lips. "The Romans tried to attack the city, but they could not breach the wall."

"So they built a ramp," he supplied.

She nodded. The glass of liquor was warming between her hands, her face felt a little flushed, but this felt so much like disappearing into a storybook or a fairytale that she couldn't stop herself. Hours earlier, she had felt the dread and disbelief pooling beneath her ribcage, and now, as she spoke, it was twisting itself back up again. "But when they reached the other side…do you know what they found?"

"Bodies."

"Yes. Everyone was dead. They had killed themselves to avoid being captured by the Romans – everyone, nine-hundred men and women and children."

Her voice seemed to rise a bit at the final word and she tightened her jaw reflexively in an attempt to stifle any subsequent wavering; but she was too weary to really care, and she simply fell silent instead. Her eyelids had begun to droop. She wondered if there were any words left, and a comfortably solemn silence began to swallow the room once again.

* * *

At length, he spoke, and she felt his fingers brush against hers in that familiar gesture. She looked up.

"Not everyone died," he said. She blinked slowly.

"What?"

"I remember this story. Somebody had to live to tell it. There were women who hid during the massacre, and they lived."

And hadn't they been here before? Tony had been right. She had died too many times; how many times did she needed to be reminded that she'd _lived_?

* * *

_"Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror_

_up to where you're bravely working. _

_(...)  
_

_Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes._

_If it were always a fist or always stretched open,_

_you would be paralyzed.  
_

_Your deepest presence is in every small contracting_

_and expanding,_

_the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated_

_as birdwings."_

_

* * *

A/N: _I apologize for the delay. I also apologize for the abrupt ending, but it actually felt appropriate to me. This needed to be short, and there is no not-awkward way to end such a massive story line in such a brief fashion. The poem at the end there is one by Rumi.

The politics dredged up at the start of this chapter were uncomfortable for me, but necessary for such an inherently political story line; I did consult several good friends and professionals in history and poli-sci just to get their insights as I wrote this chapter, but ended up nixing most of that section because it felt like it was drawing away from the character interaction, which was the purpose of this story.

For every review I receive, I will give one fourth of a sardine to a very sweet little kitten that happens to live in my house. If that kitten goes to sleep tonight with only kitty kibble in her soft little tummy, and without any sweet sardines at all, then, well, you'll only have yourselves to blame.

Thank you,

Cricket


End file.
